Tuesday, March 05, 2013

Seven Republicans in the Iowa House are pushing a bill to prohibit parents of minor children from getting a "no fault" divorce and the proposal could be debated in a House committee this week.

... Representative Tedd Gassman, a Republican from Scarville, said he's concerned about the negative impact divorce has on children....

Under the proposed legislation, parents with kids under the age of 18 could not get a no-fault divorce. Instead, they'd have to show a spouse was guilty of adultery, had been sent to prison on a felony conviction, had physically or sexually abused someone in the family, or had abandoned the family for at least a year.

This is getting a lot of attention because Gassman cited the recent divorce of his daughter and son-in-law as a reason the law is needed, and did so in a squirm-inducing way:

"There's a 16-year-old girl in this whole mix now. Guess what? What are the possibilities of her being more promiscuous?" Gassman said. "What are the possibilities of all these other things surrounding her life that a 16-year-old girl, with hormones raging, can get herself into?"

But, um, where did he get this idea? Divorce only if there's adultery, abandonment, sexual abuse, or a prison conviction? Where does this wacky stuff come from?

Notice the year: 1997. This was when The Most Important Thing In The World was the president of the United States having an extramarital fling. What would we tell the children? Surely promiscuity would run riot in the land (because no impressionable young person had ever considered having any kind of sex pre-Monica) ... unless right-wing Christians opportunistically framed the issue by coming up with Marriage: Now With More Jesus!

The Iowa legislators seem to have made this more punitive than the 1997 version, given that they've dropped the "covenant" bit and want to impose this on everyone retroactively. I guess this is coming from that remade GOP I've heard so much about.

8 comments:

The notion is so flawed it defies reasonable debate. The notion that staying together for the children's sake is a logical insanity. as in just what the children need as a role model either no demonstrable love/affection (forbearance)between the parents or toxic family life. In his mind the solution is drawing a line between goodies and baddies.Strewth! this guys family life must be out of the 50's TV "Father Knows best" or " the Dick van Dyke show" like they were reality....If those role models were accurate why then would people choose today's marriages? By comparison a mass brain fart in which the world's people decided 'why do we want to be happy, let's live in f*'d up misery seeking um .. er... happiness, *that* sounds like fun?'. It doesn't take a mental giant to work out the truth does it?

Its already been dropped. They won't even bring it to a vote. The last thing anyone wants--even and especially this guy's own family--is a return to an earlier period of angry, bittery, blame filled divorces. Irreconcilable differences was good enough for his daughter and its good enough for the entire legislature, apparently.

As a thrice divorced single father of four and product of mid-fifies promusciity and serial sixties Hotel California divorce sadly witnessing the sins of the mother visited upon now a third generation, I don't have much to say about marraige. Divorce, on the other hand...

This strikes me as a weasel: when ever the courts - the state - become involved the male position of dominence is negated. Courts weigh heavily for children and seemingly favor the female. This generates and underlying resentment in an already resentive population, resentment further fueled by both the anticipation and adjudication REQUIRING the male to do something, for example pay support (something I never got in fourteen years of paremting).

These neanderthals would there were no divorce, the women they've grown tired of stored in a barn or turned out to pasture, or whatever it is they do with worn out livestock. It isn't about the children, who they're fucking anyway because their bible tells them it's ok to have sex with their daughters, it's about covering their own selfish, greedy and very unchristianlike asses.